Temporary Employees

Need guidance on Temporary employees understanding.
a) Temporary employee is eligible for monthly salary – If I am paying him salary less than 15000 per month do I need to deduct PF please guide.
b) Under what head normally do we pay temporary employees monthly salary
c) As per law if an temporary employee shows continuation of work for more than 6 months then as an organisation we legally bound to make him permanent
d) IF I want to continue him as temporary employee then what is the time frame or rest time I need to give the employee please guide.
Request to please add any points if I have missed and also correct my understanding where ever wrong.

Dear Hemant,

Before answering the series of your queries, I think that it is better for us to contemplate together on the concept of temporary employment. Temporary employment is normally a situation requiring the employment of additional or extra workforce for a limited period of time depending on the needs of the employer such as replacement for a leave vacancy, incidental or ancillary activities involving a few hours of work, special works lasting for a specific duration and the like. Therefore, temporary employment may be in the nature of casual labour, contract labour, part-time employees, fixed-term contract employees etc., resulting in a less formal employment relationship. After the phenomenal surge of LPG (Liberalization, Privatization, Globalization), there is a paradigm shift in staffing that temporary employment of people is preferred by the employers for the sake of easy hire and fire options. So, the position obtaining as of now is that an employer can employ a person temporarily on a permanent job under one pretext or other like fixed-term contract employment, out-sourcing etc., despite the preventive legal restrictions imposed by labour laws like Industrial Employment ( Standing Orders) Act,1946, Industrial Disputes Act,1947, Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act,1970.

Coming to your questions,

(a) I don't think that the EPF Act distinguishes the pattern of employment as temporary or permanent.

(b) I am not able to understand your question for I was in Govt. Service only through out my career..

(c) Item no.10 of Part I of the Schedule V of the ID Act,1947 says that keeping employees as temporaries on rolls years together in order to deprive them of the status and benefits of permanent employees is an unfair labour practice as defined u/s 2(ra) on the part of the employer.So it depends on the provision for confirmation in your Standing Orders as well as the type of the temporary employment.

(d)The answer to the previous query applies to this one also.

If you fix the wage period for a temporary employee for a month, then you can pay him salary on monthly basis. A temporary employee drawing wages of rs.15000/- p.m or less or a member of PF scheme previously, is entitled to PF benefit unless he is an excluded employee (one who withdrew his entire PF amount on superannuation). The rest of your queries were adequately answered by Mr.Umakanthan..
B.Saikumar
navi Mumbai

Dear hemant
Please refer epfo act 1952 for pf deductions
Or follow the state act in which u r company exist
You have told that after six month i should take as an employee better you can take trainee and than confirm aa employee why are going for temporary ..

It SEEMS that all those acts cited by Shri Umakanthan have become obsolete , inspite of the best intention of governments enacting them.But then we should keep in mind that these acts were all made before LPG era.I had joined a central PSU in 1980 and retired in 2014 and saw the transition myself.At the time of retiring hiring of all categories of staff , from labour to white collar workers ,ON CONTRACTUAL BASIS had become the order of the day.In fact there was no permanent appointment given ever since 2008 or so !

SaiBhakta,

Observation about contractual labour is pertinent.

Many PSUs have looked towards contractual labour because it is cheaper and easier to get them to work.Permanent employees are"permanent" and it is difficult to get proper productivity from them.

Union issues also come up for permanent staff.

I have seen how permanent staff who are active union members enjoy-full pay without even coming to office and even while in office spend more time in union office which they grab from administration and while away their time or keep pasting posters and updates on union notice boards.

Temporary employees were basically for short periods but again we have made temporary employees carry on and on and tried to save the expenditure and problems of permanency.

Labour as well as management need to think on this attitude of permanent staff.

Private companies may try to exploit labour but in PSUs both labor and management exploit the national resources and tax payers money.

Air India a case in example.

It flies on tax payers money and cannot generate profit on its own and has to be in the news for some incident or other.

Mr Nathrao,

I fully agree with you.I have myself seen union leaders coming to office , sign/punch attendance and being office bearers go away on pretext of union work only to sign-out at the end of duty hours.But those things are no more.In fact in Air India , Arvind Jadhav as CMD derecgnised the biggest union.Later on The Pilots Guild ( union of erstwhile AI pilots) was derecognised.In both cases this was the response of the management to a strike call given by the unions (in pilot's case even the mandatory notice was served).Now , what is a purpose of employees union ? Is collective bargaining not a matter of management's interest ? Is striking work a criminal act ? Even in more liberalized countries like France and Germany very recently there were labour strikes in their national carriers . In AI there was an arbitrary salary cut of 20% across the board on the plea that financial position is bad.How the financial position got to such a stage ? The management (under pressure) ordered 68 aircrafts when the need was for 40.Moreover these were all funded by a huge debt of 40,000 crore rupees.The annual revenues of airline at that time was 6-7 crores.Deduct all fixed and variable costs and even a schoolboy would have told that such huge loan is a sure step to disaster.Were the employees a part of this decision making ? (The fact is even many directors were not agreeable !).So there was discontent and management responded by muzzling the unions.

Coming back to our main topic , I feel that what is going on is the other end of spectrum.While the union leaders cannot be given a free hand like before , unions should not be disbanded like this.Otherwise the pent up frustration would be like a ticking time bomb and may lead to unpleasant violence like the one seen in Maruti's Manesar plant sometime back.